January 07, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- In my 35 years of experience in
journalism, I have found that most readers read in
order to confirm what they already think and
believe. It is the same for the right-wing and the
left-wing. They cannot escape their ideological
boxes and are creatures of their biases. They want
their prejudices vindicated and their beliefs
supported. A writer who tells them something that
they do not want to hear receives abuse. These
readers cannot benefit from facts and new
information and change their minds. They already
know everything and only want information that
supports their beliefs and advances their agendas.

If a writer makes the case so clear that readers
simply cannot avoid it, the reader will
intentionally misread the article or book and attack
the writer for saying everything that he does not
say. The chorus will join in the effort to shut down
the unwelcome information before it reaches others.

The Israel Lobby uses the technique of branding
everyone who criticizes, no matter how
constructively and moderately, any Israeli
government policy, no matter how egregious, an anti-semite.
The Israeli government applies this tactic to its
own Israeli political opposition and to Jews
themselves who are branded “self-hating Jews” if
they criticize government policy toward the
Palestinians. The effect is to deprive the Israeli
government of constructive criticism. Only the
Israel Lobby could call former President Jimmy
Carter an anti-semite. Anyone who is not totally
enthusiastic about Israel’s theft of Palestinian
lives and properties is an enemy of Israel. These
wild accusations from the Israel Lobby deprive anti-semite
of any meaning. Essentially, every moral person has
become an anti-semite.

The identical hardline substitution of self-interest
for factual reality characterizes the American right
and left. The right-wing insists that America is
going broke because of welfare spending. The
left-wing persists in its belief that government is
capable of great good if only the right people are
in power and that social institutions, such as
religion, and inanimate objects, such as guns, are
responsible for human evil.

If a majority of Americans were like the readers of
this site, truth could prevail over special
interests. Reality would inform social, political,
and economic life, and American prospects would be
good. But when a majority are hostile to facts and
truths that do not support their biases and serve
their interests, there is a disconnect from reality,
which is the situation in America today.

It is ironic that the left-wing, which has a large
repertoire of tales of societies in the clutches of
shamans, witch doctors and priests, imposes its own
artificial or make-believe realities on social,
political, and economic explanations. Leftists who
appear to be oblivious to the militarized murderous
police state erected by Bush and Obama still go out
of their way to tell me how evil Ronald Reagan was
and that I must also be evil because I served in the
Reagan administration.

It is ironic that the Republican federal judges that
the right-wing said were so desperately needed to
save the Constitution are precisely the ones who
have destroyed it. Americans can be indefinitely
detained or assassinated by their government on
suspicion alone without due process, because
Republicans are enamored of the “unitary executive”
theory of presidential power. The Republican Supreme
Court gave private business corporations the right
to purchase the US government in the name of free
speech, because Republicans believe private
interests should prevail over public interests.

It is easy to become discouraged by the clueless
American majority. However, as insightful people
have remarked in the past, it only takes a few
determined people to change the world. On the other
hand, in the past governments did not have such
technological advantages as they have today. In a
modern context, Paul Revere’s ride is hard to
imagine. The British would have shot him out of the
saddle with a drone. How far would Lenin have got if
the Russian government had had spy drones
everywhere?

Perhaps our hope today is that the government’s
disinformation produces unintended consequences that
overwhelm the government.

Hope or no hope, truth is becoming harder to come
by. During the Vietnam war when Daniel Ellsberg
leaked the Pentagon Papers, the New York Times
published them. However, during the Iraq war when a
National Security Agency whistleblower leaked the
information to the New York Times that the Bush
regime was spying on Americans without obtaining
warrants from the FISA court as required by law, the
New York Times told the White House and sat on the
story for one full year until Bush was reelected.
The newspaper might even have turned in the
whistleblower. When the Guardian and other
newspapers were threatened by the US government,
they turned on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the
suppliers of their headline stories.

To see the fate of whistleblowers, read Sibel
Edmonds' book, Classified Woman. Few people are
willing to undergo such wear and tear in an effort
to get truth to the American people.

There is another constraint on revealing truth. The
human capital of people with inside knowledge is
destroyed if they speak out. Position, contacts,
invitations, income, and social life are all
forfeited when an insider becomes a dissenter or a
truth-teller. Only the extremely naive can believe
that governments cannot keep conspiracies a secret,
“because someone would talk.” No one talks, because
talking harms the personal interests and human
capital of the insider, and seldom does any good.

Al Jazeera was founded in the closing years of the
20th century to provide more objective news coverage
of the Middle East than the spun news coverage of
the Western media. The news organization soon fell
afoul of Washington and its Middle Eastern puppet
states and was reined in by censorship, threats, and
actual physical attacks by US military forces on its
Kabul and Baghdad offices.

Truth-tellers are inconvenient. Major General
Antonio Taguba was given the assignment of
conducting the official inquiry into the Abu Ghraib
prisoner abuse. Instead of covering up the incidents
as he was expected to do for his third star, he
produced a professional and truthful report. It was
Taguba’s career that was terminated, not the careers
of those responsible for the illegal torture of
prisoners. Gen. Taguba was instructed to resign by
Gen. Richard Cody, the Vice-Chief of Staff of the
Army. When told that he was going to be
investigated, Taguba said, “I’d been in the Army 32
years by then, and it was the first time that I
thought I was in the Mafia.”

General Benton K. Partin, the US Air Force’s
munitions expert, wrote to
Senator Trent Lott on July
30, 1995: “The attached report contains conclusive
proof that the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was not
caused solely by the truck bomb. Evidence shows that
the massive destruction was primarily the result of
four demolition charges placed at critical
structural points at the third floor level.” Partin
was Commander of the Air Force Armament Technology
Laboratory and had ultimate responsibility for all
nonnuclear weapons in the Air Force. His report fell
on deaf ears and disappeared down the memory hole.

So did the report of University of Copenhagen nano-chemist
Niels Harrit, a member of a team of scientists who
found reacted and unreacted nano-thermite in the
dust of the World Trade Center towers. The findings
of this scientific team are known in Europe and
Canada, but were not reported by the US media.
Anyone who still believes the official story of 9/11
should
listen to the interview with this accomplished
scientist or read, if able, the scientific
paper.

They should also read the 9/11 Toronto Report:
International Hearings on the Events of September
11, 2001. Hearings were held at a Canadian
university in Toronto on the 10th anniversary of the
9/11 attacks at which experts and professionals
presented evidence that the official story of 9/11
is improbable. The hearings were conducted as if
they were a grand jury proceeding before a panel of
judges consisting of accomplished scholars and Judge
Ferdinando Imposimato, the Honorary President of the
Supreme Court of Italy. Judge Imposimato cut his
teeth as the “scourge of the Mafia.” His cases
involved the kidnapping and murder of Italian
President Aldo Moro, the attempted assassination of
Pope John Paul II, and the Mafia assassination of
Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa.

Judge Imposimato concluded, as did the other
accomplished members of the panel, that “the
omissions of relevant evidence in the NIST
investigation and the investigation of the Pentagon,
their contradictions and the lack of independence
and impartiality, as a body controlled by the Bush
administration, requires an impartial, independent
scientific investigation group.”

As far as I am able to ascertain, the Toronto
Hearings and the decisions based on evidence alone
by the panel of judges was never reported in the US
media. Not a single member of the US Congress raised
even one question. The American presstitutes were
utterly silent.

The country in which we live is one in which the
available information consists of the government’s
lies. Information in the alternative media does not
have a track record with the wider public. Some of
the sites are too loony to be taken seriously, and
the information provided by credible sites is too
different from what the public hears from the print
and TV media for the public to take it seriously. I
have wondered if governments are behind the worst
sites in order to discredit alternative media.

Government agencies and corporations recognize the
threat posed to their control of explanations by
internet writers and hire “trolls” to use the
comment sections of sites to discredit
truth-tellers. The combination of trolls and readers
who only want to hear what they want to hear can
bury the truths that try to emerge.

The year 2012 consisted of a continuous sequence of
destructive acts by Congress and the White House. In
a final destructive act, the Senate passed the
National Defense Authorization Act for 2013. This
act continues the unconstitutional grant of power to
the executive branch to violate all rights of US
citizens. In the US laws cannot take precedence over
the Constitution. Yet, we now have successive
National Defense Authorization Acts that render the
Bill of Rights moot.

There is no public uproar over the idea that
national defense requires that US citizens lose the
protection of law that is granted by the US
Constitution. When citizens stand defenseless before
their own government, what national defense do they
have?

The obvious conclusion is that most Americans are
indifferent to liberty and are content with tyranny.

I am not indifferent. I cannot promise to always be
right and never make a mistake, but with your
financial and moral support, truth will continue to
have a future on this site.

Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall
Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week,
Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate.
He has had many university appointments. His
internet columns have attracted a worldwide
following.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

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